The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Editorial: War Crimes against women and the outlets that ignore them

In Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki terrorizes the Iraqi people.

No one gets more tortured than the Iraqi women:

For example, Fatima Hussein (not her real name), a journalist accused of involvement in
the murder of a parliamentarian’s brother and of being married to an Al-Qaeda member,
described physical and sexual torture in early 2012 at the hands of one particular
interrogator in Tikrit, Colonel Ghazi. She described Ghazi tying her blindfolded to a column
and electrocuting her with an electric baton,
hitting her feet and back with cable, kicking
her, pulling her hair, tying her naked to a column and extinguishing cigarettes on her body,
and later handcuffing her to a bed, forcing her to give him oral sex, and raping her three
times. "There was blood all over me. He would
relax, have a cigarette, and put it out on my
buttock, and then started again," she said.

Do you remember last year when McClatchy's Hannah Allem was grandstanding in public about how the most important thing was the fate of the Iraqis trying to get into the US? And how this problem needed serious attention? And she kept grandstanding until it was pointed out that she'd never written a report on this topic or even done a Tweet?

Well Hannah still useless.

Human Rights Watch released their report on Thursday of last week.

Thursday and Friday? Hanna Allem served up 40 Tweets and reTweets.

How many were on the HRW report about Iraqi women?

10?

Try lower.

8?

Lower.

5?

Let's just end the guessing.

Zero.

Human Rights Watch released a report that's over 100 pages, addressing what happens to Iraqi women in prisons and detention centers and Hannah Allem can't even be bothered to serve up 140 characters or less about the report.

Here's what one Iraqi woman shared to HRW:

They took us with the children. For the first half-hour they held us in the
same room. Then they separated us and the torture started. The first day
they tortured me all night, through until the morning. I was bleeding on the
floor. I couldn’t breastfeed my baby. They used electricity on me the first
four or five days, after that they mostly
just beat me.... My shoulders are still
damaged and I can’t pray.
Ibtihal said that four men at the
8th Brigade headquarters interrogated her about Khalid.
I told them I only know he works as a laborer. They beat me up and
electrocuted me during two days, asking me over and over where he works
and what he does. When I didn’t know the answers they handcuffed my
hands behind my back, blindfolded me and beat and kicked me, calling me
bad names. They would do this two or
three times a day, about a half-an hour each time, for three days.

What happens in interrogation? One woman offers:They used a thick black tube they calle
d the “donkey.” They beat me with it
and inserted it into my vagina. They
chained me to a bed and threatened to
rape me with their dogs. They asked me how I had sex with my husband
and made me dance with them.

A woman grabbed in a super market by Nouri's forces was quickly beaten, shocked with electricity and more. When that didn't force her to sign a false confession, they used her daughter to threaten her:

They pulled up her
picture on my mobile, and said, "Is this [name withheld]?"  They
knew her name, where she went to school, everything. They said "We can
take her just like we took you."  I would have said anything at that
point.

While Women's Media Center has a campaign which insists "Don't Let Women's Voices Be Silenced in 2014," they have thus far let Iraqi women be silenced by refusing to write an article or even a Tweet about the HRW report (and they've 28 Tweets since the report was released).

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Jim, Dona, Jess, Ty, "Ava" started out this site as five students enrolled in journalism in NY. Now? We're still students. We're in CA. Journalism? The majority scoffs at the notion.
From the start, at the very start, C.I. of The Common Ills has helped with the writing here. C.I.'s part of our core six/gang. (C.I. and Ava write the TV commentaries by themselves.) So that's the six of us. We also credit Dallas as our link locator, soundboard and much more. We try to remember to thank him each week (don't always remember to note it here) but we'll note him in this. So this is a site by the gang/core six: Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I. (of The Common Ills).